embracing a fully awkward ex-pat existence.

It's official.
We've become those kind of ex-pats.
Early indications of our transformation into socially odd, "third culture" misfits began with my purchase of a pseudo-African embroidered tunic shirt in early September. It was a fateful purchase—one that began with ridicule from my roommate and ended with ruining an entire load of whites. RIP, H&M pants.

But the warning signs continued. Next was the complete breakdown of our native tongue: the increasing frequency with which we spoke in Arabish (not quite English, not quite Arabic) to one another. In fact, we soon noticed our complete inability to speak anything but Arabish, even with friends and family back home who couldn't appreciate the sprinkling of Egyptian expressions into our English.

Not only this, but it has become steadily more difficult to speak like real Americans. Listening to the stilted, awkward English of even our most fluent Egyptians, we have begun to imitate their unnatural diction. "This is the point," which I now say at the beginning of most every sentence. And "I miss you too much!" I often exclaim, kissing both cheeks of my female friends. "It has been long time since I see you!" All of this, of course, is also said in an affected Egyptian accent, imitating the heavy R's and difficult ur's of my friends who are speaking English as their second language.

Extra enunciation further differentiates me from my American compatriots. "I need to use the in-ter-net. Where can I find the in-ter-net? Connection? Is there? Wireless?" I inquire of the café owners. Yesterday, I taught my students "Whadjya do?" and "Whatcha doin'?" only to realize that it had been 4 months since I had allowed myself an uninhibited "Whadjya do last night?" in Egyptian company. My tongue felt immediate relief at the sloppy syllables. Ahh. Home again. So much for the verbal section of my GRE—whatever gains I make from studying prefixes, I'm losing more every day to the steady erosion of my American syntax by Egyptian English speakers.

Language, however, is only one of our many concerns. Our newly revealed tendency to clutch greedily at fresh ex-pat meat is perhaps the more disturbing. At the whiff of a new foreigner's arrival, my roommates and I circle like wolves, eager to hear fresh drama from someone's life other than the girls I live with. Viewed as a mix between a new issue of People Magazine and a counselor to unleash all of our stories to from a reclining couch—it is true that we can be a bit aggressive.

For example. At church last week, we met another American girl in her mid 20s who arrived just 3 weeks before to do work with infectious diseases in the Middle East and North Africa. The 4 of us immediately gathered in, an uncomfortable (but Egyptian) foot away from her face, interrupting each other to pelt her with overlapping questions and offers to help her with everything from laundry to grocery shopping to buying a mobile phone (note: not a cellphone, a mobile) to finding her Egyptian friends. While she did seem grateful for the aggressive offers of hospitality, she also was trying (in vain) to back away from us a few inches and get herself a bit of breathing space.

If this were the first time we had swooped like seagulls to a corndog, I wouldn't be so concerned. But in fact, the pattern of behavior has been clearly established. In Dahab, we cited a middle aged American woman dining by herself at a beachside restaurant. Not only did we invite her to join us for dinner, we also invited ourselves to eat her grilled fish, told her all of our adjustment-to-Egypt stories for nearly two hours, and ended with advice as to how to make your clothes softer with Egyptian washing machines (tip: add vinegar during the rinse cycle).

Or when the esteemed Mr. Razi arrived (himself an ex-pat in Ethiopia, nearly a year out of the American motherland), we nearly out-ex-pat-ed each other out of our eagerness to share our travel stories with a fresh audience. You know you're an ex-pat when you start interrupting each others' stories with "Oh yeah? That reminds me of that one time I raced donkey carts and almost got hit by a bus…" or "Well, the last time I had a parasite/foodpoisoning/fleas/abacterialboilonmyhead…" and "That reminds me—Did I ever tell you about the time we were nearly robbed with machetes when we were hitchhiking through the Ecuadorian jungle?" or "Oh sure, that's just like when I was led into a Qat den after exchanging money on the Ethiopian black market…"

Last night, all four of my roommates chanced to be home at the same time—a rare treat with our busy and often contradictory schedules. As we sat around the dining room table in our flat in Cairo, each of us clicking away on our computers or dinking around with some papers, drinking tea and eating okra with pita bread—we each began interrupting each others' work to share some fairly uninteresting anecdote from our day. I laughed to myself at the endearing ritual—no matter how mundane the moment, the recounting of our day's frustrations and bizarre interactions always puts us all in stitches. And, it's just as well that it should—the three of us are often the only audience that these stories will have.

So, here's to a fully awkward ex-pat life. Those of you I'll be seeing over Christmas, get ready: I'll start wrapping your pseudo-African embroidered shirts now to get them ready to put under the tree.